Installing WordPress on your own server.

1. Download Latest version from http://wordpress.org/
   Currently the latest stable release of WordPress is Version 2.8.4, and is available in 2 formats, zip and tar.gz. Zip - is for windows tar.gz is for everything else,. For this, I'm going to use the tar.gz file.
   
   

Download to file: http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz to your webserver.

 wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz 

Uncompress the folder

 tar -xvf latest.tar.gz 

Output

 drwxr-xr-x  5 www-data www-data    4096 2009-08-11 20:47 wordpress

 /www$ cd wordpress/
 /wordpress$ ls -la
 total 300
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   397 2008-05-25 16:33 index.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 15410 2008-12-06 02:47 license.txt
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  7642 2009-08-11 20:41 readme.html
 drwxr-xr-x 7 www-data www-data  4096 2009-08-11 20:47 wp-admin
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 40543 2009-05-20 17:32 wp-app.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   220 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-atom.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   274 2008-05-25 11:50 wp-blog-header.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  3649 2009-05-18 12:00 wp-comments-post.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   238 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-commentsrss2.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  2626 2009-02-28 04:55 wp-config-sample.php
 drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data  4096 2009-08-11 20:47 wp-content
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  1254 2009-02-07 08:32 wp-cron.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   220 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-feed.php
 drwxr-xr-x 6 www-data www-data  4096 2009-08-11 20:47 wp-includes
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  1946 2009-05-05 15:43 wp-links-opml.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  2341 2009-05-20 12:32 wp-load.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 21230 2009-08-11 02:03 wp-login.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  7113 2009-05-18 11:11 wp-mail.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   487 2009-04-20 17:50 wp-pass.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   218 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-rdf.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   316 2008-05-25 11:50 wp-register.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   220 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-rss2.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   218 2008-10-14 02:22 wp-rss.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 21520 2009-06-27 20:44 wp-settings.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  3434 2008-05-25 11:50 wp-trackback.php
 -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 92522 2009-07-03 22:49 xmlrpc.php

Lets take a look inside one of these. index.php is a good place to start

 <?php
 /**
  * Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
  * wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
  *
  * @package WordPress
  */

 /**
  * Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
  *
  * @var bool
  */
 define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
 
 /** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
 require('./wp-blog-header.php');
 ?>

The functions of this file are well described in this mostly commented file: define, and require. Ok ok, thats as far as I want to go with this post, haha, you can investigate further on your own, so just navigate to where you downloaded and expanded the folder.

Hopefully when get there you should see “Create a Configuration File” button, click it and you're on your way to your own Word Press. And thats how cool WordPress is.

Unless of course you're running your own server and you need to install apache2 and php5, and when you install in for some reason it tells you to download it instead, in that case you should check mime.conf files for missing addType declarations and make sure to clear cache in your browser after restart the server. Full disclaimer is that you need mysql also and you need your mysql user accounts ready and setup, with adequate permissions and passwords.

You can check out my own wordpress demo here: http://mars.detroitweb.net/wordpress